The Joplin City Council held an informal meeting on Monday, July 21, 2025, at approximately 5:15 p.m. The meeting featured two informational presentations: a financial update from Mrs. Haas and a municipal court update from Mr. Ratcliffe. No votes or formal actions were taken.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Joplin City Council informal meeting for Monday, July 21st, 2025. We have two items on the agenda tonight. So let's get started with item number one financial information update. Good evening, Mrs. Haas. Good evening, Mayor Council. Tonight I'll present uh sales tax for the month of July, which is nine months through the year. Uh so three months left uh for July of 2025 compared to July of last year. We're down almost five and a half percent, uh, which brings us to essentially flat for the year. Um Mr. Coppel, you asked for information related to how we stand for budget, so change that last column and change the the box at the bottom. Um little bit difficult because sales tax doesn't come in evenly, so we're basing the budget off of 2024 percentage collections for that month. Uh so given that we're a little bit below budget by that 27,800. If you look at the box, um yeah, of course, we budgeted the 18.1 million dollars. Um we should have collected 74.41 percent, and we're at 74.26 percent. So that's where we stand on sales tax. Uh is that what you were kind of looking for? Thank you. Uh so I still have to get that added for use tax. Um I didn't quite have enough time, but hopefully next month I can I can add that column for use tax. So use tax uh for July. Um we're up 10 just over 10 and a half percent. Uh so for the year we're up almost six and a half percent. Uh marijuana uh for some reason uh is down uh for the month, it could be timing. Um I didn't get a chance to look at that, but um it's down uh you can see normally we're somewhere between 50 and 65,000 on average. Uh so uh that's probably timing issue, and then we have the quarterly report or sales tax, uh, which is uh pretty interesting. Um so this is just for the quarter, uh May through July. Uh the blue bar is last year, uh the green bar is this year. Uh so you can see uh the malls down uh for the same quarter as last year. Discount stores are up just a little bit, uh grocery stores uh pretty much even restaurants are pretty much even, but construction and home improvement is way down for the quarter. Motor vehicle is up, uh, but it has been down. Um telephone utilities down just a little bit, convenience stores even uh north park crossing down considerably, 1717 about even, and then general retail is up a little bit for the quarter. But if you look at year to date, which would be through three quarters, uh the pink bar is last year, the yellow bar is this year. You can see we're down uh at the mall. Discount stores are up, uh grocery stores flat, uh restaurants are down, uh, which if you as you look at this, kind of think about how you spend your money in town, and it probably pretty well matches this. Uh construction and home improvement is way down, motor vehicles down, which motor vehicles are down across the state. State of Missouri has noted uh this decline on motor vehicle, which is one of our biggest ticket items. Uh convenience stores are down, and typically convenience stores are up. North Park Crossing is is down considerably, and then 1717 and general retail are pretty well flat. So I do think this is reflective of what we're seeing uh right now. People are not spending money, um, kind of holding on to it for various reasons. So any questions on sales tax? Council, any questions, Mr. Koppel. Uh, can you go back to the first sales tax slide? And uh on page two is the one percent sales tax minus the TIFF, correct? Yes. Okay. And I don't know if it's just an anomaly or why, but every other month it shows down from the slide above, which you would expect since we're paying TIFFs out of it, but this month it's like 150,000 over what it was. But this month it's like 150,000 over what it was.